Child is father to the man! Jim Rose, stern, secret operative, wept the tears of the mostly unworthy. “You do? You think I ought to?” There was no stepmother on the scene, not at that time. Not for several years. There was no one to look after those boys if something should happen to him. And yet the boys were more concerned about their father than themselves. Or that’s how the story goes.
Do you see it now? Do you see why I felt like this was a man I too would put ahead of myself? Do you see why I loved this man, in my own ill-defined and Space Panicky way? This was a man of ideals, a man who believed in something, a man whose gentleness was most evident in the tiny little creases at the corners of his eyes, which in my private moments I referred to as the Eye Crinkles, and whose military severity was belied by his strong desire and his occasional outbursts of sentimentality. I think you can see, and I need not say more.
At 0815, the chutes opened, and we went hurtling toward the surface, as we had been instructed to do, swan-diving through cumulus clouds. We had the ventilators on, and Jim was calling out altimeter readings when he had a chance, and we were strapped down, and the sound was a deep, unrepentant roar, as of creation, and we were either going to stop in the way that we were supposed to stop, or it would be the last thing we ever knew, the throbbing of puny man-made aluminum alloy casings when faced with the enigmas of other worlds. Was I scared? You bet I was scared, and you bet I was excited too, because, as I have said, the best astronaut is the one with the least to lose. When the parachutes flowered to slow us, I felt the drag, and there was a grave heaviness to the capsule suddenly, and I didn’t know if the chutes could possibly contain it, the colonialist menace of us. And then the clear skies of a Martian spring opened up before me, and I could see, on the monitors, the canyon, which was one of the topographic features most notable on Mars, even from space, and we hurtled down toward it as though the canyon intended to swallow us, and just when it seemed that the landing could go on no longer (nor be any more dangerous), it did; it went on, and the thrusters fired, and when they did, I allowed myself the first clear thought: We are really going to land on this planet.
All my training said I was never meant to doubt, but I did, and I accepted my doubts. And yet when we felt the thrusters, both Jim and I laughed, because we were about to become legends, whether we wanted to be or not, legends for the good of an idea. The idea that if you use up one planet, there’s another one out there somewhere that you can fuck up.
“Affirmative on ignition,” Jim said.
And we slowed. And we waited. And then we were a thousand meters up, and then those numbers diminished, and I was mindful of the fact that unlike the Earth launch, which was noteworthy for the fact that I had felt like my bowels were going to betray me at any point, I felt nothing but a giddy, thrilling excitement on this end of the mission, as the numbers went down, and the thrumming of combustion slowed us still further, and then, before we knew it, there was a violent report, and the capsule struck something, struck ground, struck dust, volcanic rock, struck something cosmic, ancient, untouched.
We were on Mars. We were on Mars!
On schedule, the engines idled down, and the aerobrake assembly retracted, and a number of solar panels began unfolding themselves on the outside of the Excelsior. It was quiet. It was quiet except for Jim telling Houston, telling America, telling the world what it would not know for a good long while. “Landing as scheduled, Houston, and we didn’t strike any boulders. We seem to be on very sturdy ground. Thanks very much for the coordinates.”
We were on Mars.
“Everyone okay?” Jim called.
“First officer able and accounted for,” I said.
Then there was an enfeebled but no less enthusiastic voice that called from down in the cargo bay, “Science officer okay, but he recommends against Mars landings with broken limbs. Not the most comfortable thing.”
“José,” Jim said, “you’re a champ.”
Protocol required a number of systems tests to certify that the capsule was not, for example, on fire, and also that the hull was intact, especially as the Excelsior was about to begin serving as our Mars base, at least until Steve and Abu, from the Geronimo, began erecting the additional base facility over by the reactor that, fully automated, had begun processing fuel on the surface about six months ago. Additionally, the Pequod was going to be in charge of the greenhouse-construction operation, another two or three kilometers distant. The Geronimo would be landing in the next six hours, and we accepted their congratulations on the new ham radio frequencies that were going to be our most reliable Mars-based communications system from now on, excepting the satellite above us that would make satellite phone communication possible once or twice a day.
We were on Mars! We had done the hard part! And the only thing left to do was go outside and investigate!
Jim and I got busy with the space suits down in the cargo bay. According to the thermometers we had on board, the outdoor temperature (at about 9:30 A.M., Martian time) was about −20 centigrade, though the sun was bright and the air a luminous pink. Everything that you have seen from all the rover missions and the flybys of the past thirty years is true. The soil is bright orange, and the rocks around which it blows are a deep gray. There’s a lot of sulfur around, and some methane in the atmosphere, so the prediction is that Mars actually smells really horrible. We were glad to have helmets and respirators, because even if we were able to take off our gear (which we would be able to do for very brief spells in low elevation as the mission moved toward summer, and even then in danger of frostbite and hypothermia), it would probably smell a lot like the industrial parts of Omaha or Shanghai.
I haven’t even mentioned the exhaustion of suddenly having weight again, right? After three months of weightlessness? It was a good thing that I weighed less than a famine victim here on Mars, because I don’t know if my muscles could have taken much more than the forty or fifty pounds, roughly speaking, that I weighed on the Red Planet. I was wobbly, and I was hallucinating that every heavy piece of equipment that Jim and I had to put on would float, as it had for three months. José was probably the most likely to want weightlessness, to help with his leg. But at least he was still, with his new amnesiac personality, encouraging.
“This gear is like lead,” I said to Jim.
Jim gave me the first sheepish smile of the Martian period of our friendship. “I guess this is how we get back in shape.”
Still, we couldn’t get the outerwear on fast enough. What is it that man loves about a wasteland, kids? What is it about a desolate and empty place that always looks to him like some large-scale merchandising operation? Why is it that nature so abhors a vacuum? My face was glued to the window, to every dune and declivity in the featureless track. As far as the eye could see was only about fifty or sixty kilometers on Mars, but in those sixty kilometers there was a lot of empty mileage. I couldn’t wait to get out there; I couldn’t wait to see it, to walk in it, to kneel in the emptiness, in the mystery, in the millennia of silence and howling gales that was Mars.